Saturday, June 18, 2011

Turns out that the self proclaimed "No. 1 global warming denier in Minnesota" one Michael Jungbauer, a man, whom in his own words, has "studied all 13 disciplines of science" contained in the IPCC reports, and now sits in the Minnesota state senate, well, he has been engaged in resume embroidery, amusing resume embroidery, but resume embroidery none the less.

Sen. Jungbauer is fond of making pronouncements from on high regarding the scientific weakness of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He takes positions in direct opposition to 98 percent of published and peer-reviewed climate, atmospheric scientists and glaciologists. But the water and sewer treatment specialist by day is, apparently, quite knowledgeable on all manner of science. It certainly appears to be. He uses big words and cites studies in his lectures.

No scientist

The problem is, he is not a scientist. Even though his published biography lists his higher education credits from Moody Bible Institute, Anoka Ramsey Community College and Metropolitan State University and that he is working on his master's degree in environmental policy and that he has a background in biochemistry, it turns out he has never graduated from college. He doesn't have a bachelor's degree.

He is an ordained minister, of sorts. But, although his official biography says he has a degree from Moody, he does not. In direct answer to my question, Jungbauer responded: "No I did not graduate. But I have a certificate."

There is lots more at the MinnPost site, and Eli strongly encourages following the link, but collecting certificates appears to be a habit among the rejectionists. Many, including Jungbauer, are just the sort of folks that get their degrees by mail. The picture comes from dotearth, where Andy Revkin was reporting on the 2009 Heartland NIPCC Conference. Jungbauer was on a panel with Don Easterbrook. Andy liked Jungbauer, but listening to him on various videos, it is clear that the guy is not what he claims to be. Shelby has an embedded video showing Jungbauer at work in a MN Senate hearing. Listen to it, there are several "tells". Can the bunnies spot them?

Anyhow, Shelby is organizing a cage match between Jungbauer with the Gish Gallop and John Abraham with the butterfly net.

8 comments:

A man of the people, salt of the earth stereotype of a sleazy car salesman.

From the article: He told me that he is getting a master's degree in environmental policy at Metropolitan State University, but that school doesn't have a master's program in environmental policy. When I asked him about that, he said: "Well, that's what they told me."

Unfortunately the "evidence" presented by Bill Grant in the video, isn't: the relationship between CO2 and temperature during the glacial/interglacial cycle is indeed one of reversed causality compared to today. People should really do their homework before venturing a slick debater like this.

Actually one of the nicest pieces of evidence for greenhouse warming is the old Arrhenius-Langley experiment back around 1900 but repeatable today: thermal infrared from the Moon is absorbed in proportion to the log of the number of greenhouse molecules along the optical path through the atmosphere. This classical experiment even measured the water-vapour feedback!

Martin, Eli disagrees with a caveat, what Grant said clearly had to deal with is the issue of how a feedback, if introduced extraneously becomes a forcing which is what happens with the glacical cycles.

One saw this in vacuum tube amplifiers. The amplification increased as the system warmed up, think of that warming as the positive feedback, but at every point if you turned up the volume the sound got louder corresponding to the forcing.

Also, FWIW, Jungbauer quoted a twenty year lag which is much too short and if can be traced back will indicate his source. Eli is a lazy bunny

Eli, yep. The executive summary is, that if you compute climate sensitivity 'naively' from the coefficient between CO2 and temps during the ice age cycle, you get 10 degrees per doubling, three times too much. What happens is that 2/3 of the five degrees temp swing comes from albedo feedback (and that can be computed, we know the ice sheet extents), and 1/3 from CO2 feedback (and we need that for the budget to close, and this works only if the sensitivity is ~3 degrees per doubling). And of course the primus motor is the Serbian Barbeque, which itself contributes zero globally but leverages the land ice.

I did not get the impression that Bill Grant understood all this. BTW yes, the 20 years is amazing: the denialist conventional wisdom on this is 800 years, a value which was indeed published long ago...

"1. Their upper tropospheric water vapor feedback loop is grossly wrong. They assume that increases in atmospheric CO2 will cause large upper-tropospheric water vapor increases which are very unrealistic. Most of their model warming follows from these invalid water vapor assumptions. Their handlings of rainfall processes are quite inadequate. "-Bill Gray

Maybe. And that is a big maybe, there could be a slight positive feedback but it isn't 300%. To me, it is more realistic that negative feedbacks dominate the climate system.

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.